'Joe the Plumber' adds to Klein's kook credentials

... "For years I've said, you know, put a damn fence on the ... border going to Mexico and start shootin'," Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber," said during a Friday fundraiser for our favorite gun-toting lawmaker, none other than state Sen. Lori Klein ...

"He was joking," she told me on Tuesday. "He was not serious. He was certainly tongue in cheek, and I think the media making such a thing of this is ridiculous ...

Among the reasons Klein achieved kookdom status was her love affair with her raspberry pink Ruger -- going so far as to point it at a Republic reporter -- her 19th-century bid to bring back nullification and her decision last year to stand up on the Senate floor and read an unverified letter from a substitute teacher who complained that Hispanic students refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because they hate America, refused to speak English and tore up textbooks.

"I have very little respect for the lies that you told because you basically said in your thing about the kookification that I read a letter that was fictitious," she said ...